Cleanliness and Clothing

In the matter of personal cleanliness, girls on the whole are tidier than boys. At Summerhill our boys and girls from about fifteen onward are concerned about their appearance. On the other hand, girls are no tidier about their rooms than boys are--that is, girls up to fourteen. They dress dolls, make theater costumes, and leave their doors littered with rubbish, but it is all creative rubbish.

Seldom do we have a girl at Summerhill who won’t wash. We did have one, aged nine, from a home where her granny had a complex about cleanliness and apparently washed Mildred ten times a day. Her housemother came to me one day, saying: “Mildred hasn’t washed for a week. She won’t have a bath and she is beginning to smell. What shall I do?”

“Send her in to me,” I said.

Mildred came in presently, her hands and face very dirty.

“Look here,” I said sternly, “this won’t do.”

“But I don’t want to wash,” she protested.

“Shut up,” I said. “Who’s talking about washing. Look in the glass.” (She did so.) “What do you think of your face?”

“It isn’t very clean, is it?” she asked, grinning.

“It’s too clean” I said. “I won’t have girls with clean faces in this school. Now get out!”

She went straight to the coal cellar and rubbed her face black. She came back to me triumphantly.

“Will that do?” she asked.

I examined her face with due gravity. “No,” I said. “There is a patch of white on that cheek.”

Mildred took a bath that night. But I can’t fathom just why she did.

I recall the case of a boy of seventeen who came to us from a private school. A week after his arrival, he became chummy with the men who filled coal carts at the station, and he began to help them with their loading. His face and hands were black when he came to meals, but no one said a word. No one cared.

It took him several weeks to live down his private school and home idea of cleanliness. When he gave up his coal-heaving, he once more became clean in person and dress, but with a difference. Cleanliness was something no longer forced on him; he had lived out his dirt complex

When Willie makes mud pies, his mother is alarmed lest the neighbors criticize his dirty clothes. In this case, the social claim --what society thinks--must give way to the individual claim-- the joy of playing and making.

Too often parents attach far too much importance to tidiness. It is one of the seven deadly virtues. The man who prides himself on his tidiness is usually a second-rate fellow who values the second best in life. The tidiest person often has the most untidy mind. I say this with all the detachment of a man whose desk always looks like a heap of papers under a No Litter notice in a public park.

In my own family, the biggest difficulty with self-regulation centered around the matter of clothing. Zoe would have liked to run about naked all day long if she had been permitted to do so. Another parent of a self-regulated child reported that when the day turned cold, her daughter of two automatically came into the house and asked for warm clothes. We did not have this experience. Zoe shivered until her nose and cheeks turned blue, and then resisted all our efforts to get her to put on more clothes.

Courageous parents might say, “Her own organism will guide her. Let her shiver, she’ll be all right!” But we were not courageous enough to risk pneumonia, so we bullied her into wearing what we thought she ought to wear.

Parents must decide what clothes small children should wear. When children grow to adolescence, however, they should be allowed to choose their own clothes. A million daughters suffer because their mothers insist upon selecting their clothes for them. As a rule, boys are easier to dress. If a parent can afford it, a good way is to give a boy or girl a clothes allowance. If he wants to spend the money on movies and candy, that’s up to him.

What is unpardonable is to dress your child in a way that will set him apart from his friends. To put an overgrown boy into short pants when all his classmates are wearing long ones is cruel.

Daughters should be free to do as they like with their hair: to have it long, short, or braided. If they want to use lipstick, why not? Personally, I hate the sight of the stuff, but if my daughter feels otherwise, I shall not try to dissuade her.

Young children have no innate interest in clothes, but the child whose parents are neurotic on the subject of clothes soon acquires a complex himself. He fears to climb a tree lest he rip his pants.

Normal children shed their clothes anywhere and everywhere, discarding a sweater and forgetting where it was left. If I walk over our school grounds on a summer evening, I can always pick up an assortment of shoes and jerseys.

Children who do not go to boarding schools have to contend with the opinions of neighbors. Think of the thousands of children who are sacrificed to that abomination called Sunday clothes. You see them solemnly walking out in stiff collars and white dresses, fearful to kick a ball or climb a gate. Fortunately, that idiocy is dying out.

At Summerhill on a hot day, boys and teachers will sit at lunch, shirtless. No one minds. Summerhill relegates minor things to their proper place, treating them with indifference.

It is chiefly in the matter of clothes that a parent shows his money complex. We once had a very bad young thief in Summerhill who was cured after four years of hard work and infinite patience on the pert of his teachers. This boy left at seventeen. His mother wrote, “Bill has arrived home. Two pairs of his socks are missing. Can you please see that they are returned to us.”

At times, parents exhibit jealousy of the housemother who looks after their children in Summerhill. I have had visiting mothers go straight to their children’s clothes closets with many a frown and a tut-tut, suggesting that the housemother was inadequate. Such a mother usually experiences great anxiety about her child, for an anxiety about clothes always means an anxiety about learning and everything else.

Toys

If I had any business sense, I would open a toyshop. Every nursery is filled with toys that are broken and neglected. Every middleclass child gets far too many toys. In fact, most toys that cost more than a few cents are wasted.

Once Zoe received a gift from an old pupil of a wonderful walking and talking doll. It was obviously an expensive toy. About the same time, a new pupil gave Zoe a small cheap rabbit. She played with the big expensive doll for half an hour, but she played with the cheap little rabbit for weeks. In fact, she took the rabbit to bed with her each night.

Of all her toys, the only one that Zoe retained a liking for was Betsy Wetsy, a self-wetting doll I bought for her when she was eighteen months old. The wetting arrangement did not interest her one bit; perhaps because it was a puritanical fake, its “wee-wee hole” having been placed in the small of the back. Only when she reached four and a half did Zoe say one morning, “I’m tired of Betsy Wetsy and want to give her away.”

Some years ago, I tried out a questionnaire on older children. “When do you get most annoyed with your little brother or sister?” In practically every case, the answer was the same, “When he breaks my toys.”

One should never show a child how a toy works. Indeed, one should never help a child in any way until or unless he is not capable of solving a problem for himself.

Self-regulated children seem content to amuse themselves for long periods with their toys and games. They do not smash them about as molded children so often do.

There is no reason why a baby in a private home or a fairly soundproof home should not be allowed to play with kitchen things when they are not in use, such as noisy lids with wooden spoons for drumsticks. He is likely to prefer these to the usual toys sold in toyshops. Indeed, the average toy can be a soporific, lulling baby into a dull somnolence.

All parents have a tendency to overbuy toys. Baby eagerly holds out his hands toward some gadget--a tractor, a giraffe that nods-and parents buy it on the spot. Thus, most nurseries are full of toys in which the child never shows real interest.

There are far too few creative toys on the market. There are many construction toys in metal and wood, but few creative toys. Construction toys are like crossword puzzles or mathematical riddles. Since someone else has made them, their solutions can never be wholly original. I confess that I could not invent a creative toy of any kind, and have no suggestions to offer in that department. But I am certain that the toy world is awaiting some wizard who will get nearer the bean of a child than toy makers do today.

Noise

Children are naturally noisy, and parents must accept this fact and learn to live with it. A child, if he is to grow in health, must be allowed a fair amount of noisy play.

For nearly forty years now, I have lived with children’s noise. As a rule I do not consciously hear that noise. An analogy would be living in a brass factory; one becomes accustomed to the perpetual clang of hammers. And those who live on busy streets come to be unaware of the roar of traffic. One difference is that hammering and traffic are more or less constant sounds whereas the noise of children is ever varied and strident. The noise can get on one’s nerves. I must confess that when I moved out of the main building to live in the cottage some years ago, the peace of the evening was most pleasant after years of the noise of some fifty children.

The Summerhill dining room is a noisy place. Children, like animals, are loud at meal times. We only allow visitors without noise complexes to dine with us. My wife and I dine alone, but then we spend about two hours a day serving out the children’s dinners, and we need the respite from noise. The teachers do not like too much noise, but the adolescents do not seem to mind the noise of the juniors. And when a senior does bring up the question of the juniors’ noise in the dining room, the juniors quite truthfully roar their protests that the seniors make just as much noise.

The suppression of noise never gives the child so strong a repression as does the suppression of interest in bodily functions. Noise is never called dirty. The tone of voice that father adopts in shouting “Stop that row!” is an open, heartfelt expression of impatience. The tone of mother when she says “Pfui! Dirty!” is a shocked, moral tone.

At Summerhill, some children play all day, especially when the sun is shining. Their play is generally noisy. In most schools noise, like play, is suppressed. One of our former pupils who went to a Scottish university said, “The students make a hell of a row in classes, and it gets rather tiresome; for we at Summerhill lived out that stage when we were ten.”

I recall an incident in that great novel, The House with the Green Shutters, where the students of Edinburgh University played John Brown’s Body with their feet in order to heckle and tease a weak lecturer. Noise and play go together, but it is best when they go together at the age of seven to fourteen.

Manners

To have good manners means to think of others, no - to feel for others. One must be group-conscious, have the gift of putting oneself in the other man’s shoes. Manners prohibit the wounding of anyone. To be mannerly is to have genuine good taste. Manners cannot be taught, for they belong to the unconscious. Etiquette, on the other hand, can be taught, for it belongs to the conscious. It is the veneer of manners.

Etiquette allows one to talk during a concert; etiquette permits gossip and scandal. Etiquette requires us to dress for dinner, to rise when a lady approaches our table, to say, “Excuse me” when we have the table. This is all conscious, outer, meaningless behavior.

Bad manners always spring from a disordered psyche. Slander and scandal and gossip and backbiting are all subjective faults; they show hatred of self. They prove that the scandal- monger is unhappy. If we can take children into a world where they will be happy, we shall automatically rid them of all desire to hate. In other words, these children will have good manners in the deepest sense; that is, they will show forth loving-kindness.

If children eat peas with knives, these same children will not necessarily offend by talking through a Beethoven symphony. If they pass Mrs. Brown without doffing their caps, these same children will not necessarily pass on the report that Mrs. Brown drinks brandy.

Once when I was lecturing, an old man got up and complained about the manners of children today. “Why,” he said with warmth, “last Saturday I was walking in the park, and two small children came by. “Hello man,’ said one of them.”

I answered him, “What is wrong with ‘Hello, man?’ Would it have pleased you better if they had said, ‘Hello, gentleman!’ The truth is that you were injured. Your sense of dignity was offended. You want subservience from children, not manners.”

This is true of many adults. It is pure conceit. It is the treating of children as if they were vassals under feudalism. It is selfishness a type of selfishness that has far less justification than has the selfishness of children. Children must be selfish, but an adult ought to confine his selfishness to things, and not to people.

I find that children correct each other. One of my pupils made eating a very loud affair until the others jeered at him. On the other hand, when one little fellow used his knife for eating mince, the others were inclined to think it a good plan. They asked each other why you shouldn’t eat with a knife. The reply that you might cut your mouth was dismissed on the grounds that most knives are blunt enough for anything.

Children should be free to question the rules of etiquette, for eating peas with a knife is a personal thing. They should not be free to question what might be called social manners. If a child enters our drawing room with muddy boots, we shout at him, for the drawing room belongs to the adults, and the adults have the right to decree what and who shall enter and what and who shall not.

When a boy was impudent to our butcher, I told the pupils at a General School Meeting that the butcher had complained to me. But I think it would have been better if the butcher had boxed the boy’s ears. What people generally call manners are not worth teaching. They are at best survivals of customs. The doffing of the hat in the presence of ladies is a meaningless custom. As a boy, I doffed my hat to the minister’s wife, but not to my mother or sisters. I suppose I dimly realized that I did not have to pretend in their presence. Still, customs like doffing the hat are, at worst harmless. The boy will conform to custom later on. At the age of seven, however, anything savoring of sham should be kept away from him.

Manners should never be taught. If a child of seven wants to eat with his fingers, he should be free to-do so. No child should ever be asked to behave in a certain way, so that Aunt Mary will approve. Sacrifice all the relations and neighbors in the world rather than stunt a child for life by making him behave insincerely. Manners come of themselves. Old Summerhillians have excellent manners-even if some of them licked their plates at the age of twelve. No child should be forced to say, “Thank you,” – not even encouraged to say, “Thank you.”

Most people, parents or otherwise, would be started at the lack of depth in manners among the usual, character-molded boys and girls who come to Summerhill. Boys come with beautiful manners and soon drop them completely, realizing no doubt that their insincerity is out of place in Summerhill. The gradual dropping of insincerity in voice, in manners, and in action is the norm. Pupils from private schools generally take longest to drop their insincerity and cheek. Free children are never insolent.

To me, respect for a schoolteacher is an artificial lie, demanding insincerity; when a person really gives respect, he does so unawares. My pupils can call me as silly at any time they like to; they respect me because I respect their young lives, not because I am the principal of the school, not because I am on a - pedestal as a dignified tin god. My pupils and I have mutual respect for each other because we approve of each other.

An inquiring mother once asked me “But if I send my son here, won’t he behave like a barbarian when he comes home for holidays?”

My answer was, “Yes, if you have already made him a barbarian.”

It is true that the spoiled child coming to Summerhill goes home as a barbarian for at least the first year. If he has been brought up with manners, he will regress to barbarism every time. Which only shows how little artificial manners sink into a child.

Artificial manners are the first layer of hypocritical veneer to be dropped under freedom. New children generally show marvelous manners--that is, they behave insincerely. In Summerhill, in time, they come to have good manners - real manners, for in Summerhill we ask for no manners at all, not even a “Thank you” or a “Please.” Yet again and again, visitors say, “But their manners are delightful!”

Peter, who was with us from the age of eight to nineteen, went to South Africa. His hostess wrote, “Everyone here is charmed with his good manners.” Yet I was quite unconscious of whether he had any manners or not when he was at Summerhill.

Summerhill is a classless society; the wealth and position of one’s father does not count. What counts is one’s personality. And what counts for most is one’s sociability that is, being a good member of the community. Our good manners spring from our self-government; each one is constantly being compelled to see the other person’s point of view. It is unthinkable that any Summerhill child would mock a stutterer or jeer at one who is lame; yet prep school boys sometimes do both. Boys who say, “Please,” and “Thank you,” and “Excuse me, sir” may have very little real concern for others.

Manners are a matter of sincerity. When Jack, after leaving Summerhill, went to a factory, he found that the man who gave out nuts and bolts was always in a vile temper. Jack thought it over and came to the conclusion that the trouble was this: The men would go up to Bill and shout, “Hey, Bill, chuck over some Whitworth half-inch nuts.” But Bill wore a coat and collar, and Jack concluded that he must have felt himself a cut above the ordinary mechanics in overalls, and that his bad temper was due to his not getting the respect he thought he deserved. So when Jack needed bolts or nuts, he went up to Bill and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Brown, I need nuts and bolts.”

Said Jack to me, “It wasn’t boot-licking on my part. It was just using psychology. I was sorry for the guy.”

“What was the result?” I asked.

“Oh” said Jack, “I’m the only chap in the factory he’s civil to.”

I call that an excellent example of the manners that a community life gives to boys--thinking of and feeling for others.

I never notice bad manners among the small children, no doubt, because I do not look for than. Yet I have never seen a child rush in between two visitors who were talking together. The children never knock at my sitting-room door, but if I have visitors they simply retire quietly, often saying, “Sorry.”

A good compliment to their manners was recently given by a salesman. He said to me, “I’ve come here with cars for the last three years, and never once has a kid scratched a fender or attempted to enter a car. And this is the school where the kids are alleged to break windows all day long.”

I have already mentioned the friendliness of Summerhill children to visitors. This friendliness might be classed as good manners, for I have never heard the most antagonistic visitor complain of being molested in any way by any pupil who has been six months in the school.

Our theater performances are always marked by excellent audience manners. Even a bad turn or a poor play is applauded more or less naturally less-but the general feeling is that the actor or dramatist has done his best, and he should not be censured or despised.

The question of manners is an absolute bugbear with some parents. A ten-year-old boy from a good home came to Summerhill. He knocked at the drawing-room door when he entered, always closed the door when he went out. Said I, “It will last a week.” I was wrong. It only lasted two days.

Of course, I shout at a child, “Shut the door,” not because I try to train his manners, but because I do not want to rise and shut it myself. Manners are an adult concept. Children, be they the children of a professor or a porter, have no interest in manners.

The progress of civilization consists in ridding the world of sham and shoddy. We must leave the children free to go a step further than our veneered civilization has gone. By ridding the children of fears and hates, we are helping forward the new civilization of good manners.

Money

To most children money has a love symbolism: Uncle Bill gives me a quarter; Aunt Margaret gives me a dollar; therefore, Auntie loves me more than Uncle Bill does. Parents unconsciously know this; and too often, they spoil the child by giving him too much. As compensation, the unloved child very often gets the biggest allowance.

None of us can escape the money valuation in life. It is forced upon us everywhere. We sit in the orchestra or we sit in the balcony. Our children go to private camps or spend the summer in the city parks. Money values are a danger to every one of us.

A mother will cry, half in jest, “I wouldn’t sell my child for all the gold in the world,” and five minutes later, she will spank her child for breaking a ten-cent cup. It is the money value that is at the root of so much discipline in the home. Don’t touch that - that having cost money.

Too often children are balanced against money-but only children, not adults. My mother used to spank us if we broke a plate; but when father broke a plate, it was just an accident.

Parents give their children much anxiety about money. Far too often have I heard a child cry in dismay, “I’ve dropped my watch and broken it. What will Mommy say? I’ll be scared to tell her.”

Occasionally, one sees the opposite mechanism. I have seen a boy or a girl break things deliberately as a hate reaction again at home: “I’ll make my parents, who don’t love me, pay for it. Won’t they be wild when Neill sends in the bill!”

Some Summerhill parents send their children too much, some too little. This has always been a problem to me, one that I cannot solve. Summerhill pupils get their age in tuppence (two cent pieces) as pocket money each Monday; but some get extra money sent by post, while others get little or nothing.

At our General School Meeting, I have more than once advocated the pooling of all pocket money, saying that it is unfair that one boy should get five dollars a week while another should get only a quarter. In spite of the fact that the pupils with the big incomes are always in a very small minority, I have never had my proposals carried by general vote. Children with a dime a week will hotly defend any proposal to limit the income of their richer schoolmates.

It is better to give a child too little than too much. The Parent who slips a boy of eleven a five-dollar bill is being unwise unless the gift has a special purpose, like buying a lamp or a bicycle. Too much money spoils a child’s values. A child will get a beautiful expensive bicycle, which he does not take care of or a radio set, or an expensive toy that is uncreative.

Too much money handicaps a child’s fantasy life. To give a child a twenty-dollar boat robs him of all the creative joy of fashioning a boat out of a chunk of wood. A little girl often prizes the rag doll she made herself, and scorns the elaborate, expensive, well-dressed commercial doll that sleeps or quacks.

I notice that small children do not value money. Our five- year-olds drop their pennies or sometimes throw them away. This suggests that it is wrong to teach children to save. The home savings bank asks too much from the child; it says to him, “Think of the morrow,” at a time when only today matters to him. To a child of seven, it means nothing that he has twenty-seven dollars in the bank, especially if he suspects that parents will one day draw it out to buy him something he does not want.

Humor

There is far too little humor in our schools and certainly in our educational journals. I know that humor can have its dangers; and that some men use humor to cover up more serious matters in life, for it is so easy to laugh something off instead of facing it. Children do not use humor for that purpose. To them humor and fun mean friendliness and comradeship. Stern teachers, realizing this, banish humor from their classrooms.

The question arises, Can a stern, teacher have a sense of humor at all? I doubt it. I find in my own daily work that I use humor all day long. I joke with each child, but they all know that I am deadly serious when the occasion presents itself.

Whether you are a parent or a teacher, in order to successfully deal with children you must be able to understand their thoughts and feelings. And you must have a sense of humor-- childish humor. To be humorous with a child gives him the feeling that you love him. However, the humor must never be cutting or critical.

It is delightful to watch how a child’s sense of humor grows. Call it fun rather than humor, for a child has a sense of fun before humor develops. David Barton was practically born in Summerhill. When he was three, I would say to him, “I’m a visitor and I want to find Neill. Where is he “

David would look at me scornfully, “Silly ass, you’re him.”

When David was seven, I stopped him in the garden one day. “Tell David Barton I want to see him,” I said solemnly. “He’s over at the cottage, I think.”

David grinned broadly. “Righto,” he replied, and went over to the cottage. He came back in two minutes.

“He says he won’t come,” he said, with a sly smile.

“Did he give a reason?”

“Yes, he said he was feeding his tiger.”

David rose to this foolery at the age of seven. But when I told Raymond, who was nine, that he was fined half his pocket money for stealing the front door, he wept, and I knew that I had blundered. Two years later, he saw through my jokes.

Sally, aged three, chuckles when I meet her on the road to town and ask her the way to Summerhill; but the girls of seven or eight react by directing me the wrong way.

When I take visitors around, I usually introduce the cottage kids as “the pigs,” and they grunt appropriately. One time, it was disconcerting when I introduced them as “the pigs” and all of eight said haughtily, “Isn’t that joke rather stale now?” I had to admit that it was.

Girls have as much sense of humor as boys, but they seldom use humor to protect themselves as boys do. Some boys successfully defend themselves in this way. I have seen Dave being tried for some antisocial act. By giving his evidence in a hilarious way, he wins the gang’s appreciation and succeeds in getting a minor punishment. A girl, ever too ready to see herself in the wrong never does this. Even in the most enlightened homes - the girls suffer from the general inferiority that our society forces on womanhood.

Never treat a child with humor at the wrong time nor attack his dignity. If he has a genuine grievance, it must be taken seriously. To joke with a child who has a temperature of 102 is a mistake. But when he is convalescing, you can pretend to be the doctor or even the undertaker, and he will appreciate the joke. Perhaps children like to be treated with humor because humor involves friendliness and laughter. Even the seniors who practice witticisms do not use wit that bites. Much of the success of Summerhill is due to its sense of fun.

THREE

SEX

Sex Attitudes

I have never had a pupil who did not bring to Summerhill a diseased attitude toward sexuality and bodily functions. The children of modern parents who were told the truth about where babies come from have much the same hidden attitude toward sex that the children of religious fanatics have. To find a new orientation to sex is the most difficult task of the parent and teacher.

We know so little of the causes of the sex taboo that we can only hazard guesses as to its origin. Why there is a sex taboo is of no immediate concern to me. That there is a sex taboo is of great concern to a man entrusted to cure repressed children.

We adults were corrupted in infancy; we can never be free about sex matters. Consciously, we may be free; we may even be members of a society for the sex education of children. But I fear that unconsciously we remain to a large extent what conditioning in infancy made of us: haters of sex and fearers of sex.

I am quite willing to believe that my unconscious attitude toward sex is the Calvinistic attitude a Scottish village imposed on me in my first years of life. Possibly there is no salvation for adults; but there is every chance of salvation for children, if we do not force on them the awful ideas of sex that were forced on us.

Early in life, the child learns that the sexual sin is the great sin. Parents invariably punish most severely for an offense against sex morality. The very people who rail against Freud because he “sees sex in everything” are the ones who have told sex stories, have listened to sex stories, have laughed at sex stories. Every man who has been in the army knows that the language of the army is a sex language. Nearly everyone likes to read the spicy accounts of divorce cases and of sex crimes in the Sunday papers, and most men tell their wives the stories they bring home from their clubs and bars.

Now our delight in a sex story is due entirely to our own unhealthy education in sex matters. The savory sex interest is due to repressions. The story, as Freud says, lets the cat out of the bag. The adult condemnation of sex interest in the child is hypocritical and is humbug; the condemnation is a projection, a throwing of the guilt onto others. Parents punish severely for sex offenses because they are vitally, if unhealthily, interested in sex offenses.

Why is the crucifixion of the flesh so popular? Religious people believe that the flesh drags one downward. The body is called vile: it tempts one to evil. It is this hatred of the body that makes talk of childbirth a subject for dark corners of the schoolroom, and that makes polite conversation a cover up for everyday plain facts of life.

Freud saw sex as the greatest force in human behavior. Every honest observer must agree. But moral instruction has over emphasized sex. The first correction that a mother makes, when the child touches his sexual organ, makes sex the most fascinating and mysterious thing in the world. To make fruit forbidden is to make it delectable and enticing.

The sex taboo is the root evil in the suppression of children. I do not narrow the word sex down to genital sex. It is likely that the child at the breast feels unhappy if his mother disapproves of any part of her own body, or impedes his pleasure in his own body.

Sex is the basis of all negative attitudes toward life. Children who have no sex guilt never ask for religion or mysticism of any kind. Since sex is considered the great sin, children who are fairly free from sex fear and sex shame do not seek any God from whom they can ask pardon or mercy, because they do not feel guilty.

When I was six my sister and I discovered each other’s genitals and naturally played with each other. Discovered by our mother, we were severely thrashed; and I was locked in a dark room for hours, and then made to kneel down and ask forgiveness from God.

It took me decades to get over that early shock; and, indeed, I sometimes wonder if I ever fully got over it.

How many of today’s adults have had a similar experience? How many of today’s children are having their whole natural love of life changed into hate and aggression because of such treatment? They are being told that touching the genitals is bad or sinful and that natural bowel movements are disgusting.

Every child who is suffering from sex suppression has a stomach like a board. Watch a repressed child breathe and then look at the beautiful grace with which a kitten breathes. No animal has a stiff stomach, nor is self-conscious-about sex or defecation.

In his well-known work, Character Analysis, Wilhelm Reich pointed out that a moralistic training not only warps the thinking process, but also enters structurally into the body itself, armoring it literally with stiffness in posture and contraction of pelvis. I agree with Reich. I have observed, during many years of dealing with a variety of children at Summerhill, that when fear has not stiffened the musculature, the young walk, run, jump and play with a wonderful grace.

What then can we do to prevent sex suppression in children? Well, for one thing, from the earliest moment the child must be completely free to touch any and every part of his body.

A psychologist friend of mine had to say to his son of four, “Bob, you must not play with your wee-wee when you are out among strange people, for they think it bad. You must do it only at home and in the garden.”

My friend and I talked about it and agreed that it is impossible to guard the child against the anti-life haters of sex. The only comfort is that when the parents are sincere believers in life, the child will generally accept the parental standards and is likely to reject the outside prudery. But all the same, the mere fact that a child of five learns that he cannot bathe in the sea without pants is enough to form some kind--if only a minor kind--of sex distrust.

Today many parents put no ban on masturbation. They feel that it is natural, and they know the dangers of suppressing it. Excellent. Fine.

But some of these enlightened parents balk at the next step. Some do not mind if their little boys have sex play with other little boys, but they stiffen with alarm if a small boy and a small girl have sex play.

If my good, well-meaning mother had ignored the sex play of my year younger sister and me, our chances of growing up with some sanity toward sex would have been good.

I wonder how much impotence and frigidity in adults dates from the first interference in a heterosexual relationship of early childhood. I wonder how much homosexuality dates from the tolerance of homosexual play and the forbidding of heterosexual play.

Heterosexual play in childhood is the royal road; I believe, to a healthy, balanced adult sex life. When children have no moralistic training in sex, they reach a healthy adolescence-- not an adolescence of promiscuity.

I know of no argument against youth’s love life that holds water. Nearly every argument is based on repressed emotion or hate of life - the religious, the moral, the expedient, the arbitrary, the pornographic. None answer the question why nature gave man a strong sex instinct, if youth is to be forbidden to use it unless sanctioned by the elders of society. Those elders, some of them, have shares in companies that run films full of sex appeal, or in companies that sell all sorts of cosmetics to make girls more delectable to boys, or companies that publish magazines which make sadistic pictures and stories a magnet to their readers.

I know that adolescent sex life is not practical today. But my opinion is that it is the right way to tomorrow’s health. I can write this, but if in Summerhill I approved of my adolescent pupils sleeping together, my school would be suppressed by the authorities. I am thinking of the long tomorrow when society will have realized how dangerous sex repression is.

I do not expect every Summerhill pupil to be un-neurotic, for who can be complex-free in society today? What I hope for is that in generations to come this beginning of freedom from artificial sex taboos will ultimately fashion a life-loving world.

The invention of contraceptives must in the long run lead to a new sex morality, seeing that fear of consequences is perhaps the strangest factor in sex morality. To be free, love must feel itself safe.

Youth today has little opportunity for loving in the true sense. Parents will not allow sons or daughters to live in sin, as they call it, so that young lovers have to seek damp woods or parks or automobiles. Thus everything is loaded heavily against our young people. Circumstances compel them to convert what should be lovely and joyful into something sinister and sinful, into smut and leers, and shameful laughter.

The taboos and fears that fashioned sex behavior are those same taboos and fears that produce the perverts who rape and strangle small girls in parks, the perverts who torture Jews and Negroes.

Sex prohibition anchors sex to the family. The masturbation prohibition forces a child to interest himself in the parents. Every time a mother smacks a child’s hands for touching his genitals, the sex drive of the child gets constellated with his mother, and the hidden attitude toward the mother becomes one of desire and repulsion, love and hate. Repression flourishes in an un-free home. Repression helps to retain adult authority, but at the price of a plethora of neurosis.

If sex were allowed to go over the garden wall to the boy or girl next door, the authority of the home would be in danger; the tie to father and mother would loosen and the child would automatically leave the family emotionally. It sounds absurd but those ties are a very necessary pillar of support to the authoritative state - just as prostitution was a necessary safeguard for the morality of nice girls from nice homes Abolish sex repression and youth will be lost to authority.

Fathers and mothers are doing what their parents did to them: bringing up respectable, chaste children, conveniently forgetting all the hidden sex play and pornographic stories of their own childhood, forgetting the bitter rebellion against their parents that they had to repress with infinite guilt. They do not realize that they are giving their own children the same guilt feelings that gave them miserable nights many long years ago.

Man’s serious neurosis starts with the earliest genital prohibitions: Touch not. The impotence, frigidity, and anxiety of later life date from the tying up of the hands or the snatching away of the hands, usually with a spank. A child left to touch its genitals has every chance of growing up with a sincere, happy attitude toward sex. Sex play among small children is a natural, healthy act that ought not to be frowned on. On the contrary, it should be encouraged as a prelude to a healthy adolescence and adulthood. Parents are ostriches hiding their heads in the sand if they are ignorant that their children have sex play in dark corners. This kind of clandestine and furtive play breeds a guile that lives on in later life, a guilt that usually betrays itself in disapproval of sex play when these same children become parents. Bringing sex play out into the light is the only sane thing to do. There would be infinitely less sex crime in the world if sex play were accepted as normal. That is what moral parents cannot see or dare not see, that sex crime and sex abnormality of any kind are a direct result of disapproval of sex in early childhood.

The famous anthropologist, Malinowski, tells us that there was no homosexuality among the Trobrianders until the shocked missionaries segregated boys and girls in separate hostels. There was no rape among the Trobrianders, no sex crimes. Why! Because small children were given no repressions about sex.

The question for parents today is this: Do we want our children to be like us? If so, will society continue as it is, with rape and sex murder and unhappy marriages and neurotic children? If the answer to the first question is yes, then the same answer must be given to the second question. And both answers are the prelude to atomic destruction, because they postulate the continuance of hate and the expression of this hate in wars.

I ask moralist parents: Will you worry much about your children’s sex play when the atomic bombs begin to drop? Will the virginity of your daughters assume great importance when clouds of atomic energy make life impossible? When your sons are conscripted for the Great Death, will you still hold on to your little chapel faith in the suppression of all that is good in childhood? Will the God you blasphemously pray to then save your life and those of your children?

Some of you may answer that this life is only the beginning, that in the next world there will be no hate, no war, no sex. In that case, shut this book--for we have no contact.

To me, eternal life is a dream--an understandable dream indeed-for man has failed in practically everything except mechanistic invention. But the dream is not good enough. I want to see heaven on earth, not in the clouds. And the pathetic thing is that most people want the same thing. They want, but haven’t the will to reach it, the will that was perverted by the first slap, the first sex taboo.

For a parent there is no sitting on the fence, no neutrality. The choice is between guilty-secret sex or open-healthy-happy sex. If parents choose the common standard of morality, they must not complain of the misery of sex-perverted society, for it is the result of this moral code. Parents then must not hate war, for the hate of self that they give their children will express itself in war. Humanity is sick, emotionally sick, and it is sick because of this guilt and the anxiety acquired in childhood. The emotional pest is everywhere in our society.

When Zoe was six she came to me and said, “Willie has the biggest cock among the small kids, but Mrs. X [a visitor] says it is rude to say cock.” I at once told her that it was not rude. Inwardly, I cursed that woman for her ignorant and narrow understanding of children. I might tolerate propaganda about politics or manners, but when anyone attacks a child by making that child guilty about sex, I fight back vigorously.

All our leering attitude toward sex, our guffaws in music halls, our scribbling of obscenities on urinal walls spring from the guilty feeling arising from suppression of masturbation in infancy and from driving mutual sex play into holes and corners. There is secret sex play in every family; and because of the secrecy and guilt, there are many fixations on brothers and sisters that last throughout life and make happy marriages impossible. If sex play between brother and sister at the age of five were accepted as natural, each of them would advance freely to a sex object outside the family.

The extreme forms of sex hate are seen in sadism. No man with a good sex life could possibly torture an animal, or torture a human, or support prisons. No sex-satisfied woman would condemn the mother of a bastard.

Of course, I lay myself open to the accusation: “This man has sex on the brain. Sex isn’t everything in life. There is friendship, work, joy, and sorrow. Why sex?”

I answer: Sex affords the highest pleasure in life. Sex with love is the supreme form of ecstasy because it is the supreme form of both giving and receiving. Yet sex is obviously hated; otherwise no mother would forbid masturbation-no father forbid a sex life outside conventional marriage. Otherwise, there would be no obscene jokes in vaudeville halls, nor would the public waste its time seeing love films and reading love stories; it would be practicing love.

The fact that nearly every motion picture deals with love proves that sex is the most important factor in life. The interest in these films is, in the main, neurotic. It is the interest of sex- guilty, sex-frustrated people. Unable to love naturally because of sex guilt, they flock to film stories that make love romantic, even beautiful. The sex-repressed live out their interest in sex by proxy. No man, no woman with a full love life could be bothered sitting twice a week in a movie house seeing trashy pictures which are only imitations of real life.

So it is also with popular novels. They either deal with sex or with crime, usually a combination of the two. A very popular novel, Gone with the Wind, was a favorite, not because of the background of the tragedy of the Civil War and the slaves, but because it centered around a tiresome, egocentric girl and her love affairs.

Fashion journals, cosmetics, leg shows, highbrow sophisticated reviews, sex stories all show dearly that sex is the most important thing in life. At the same time, they prove that only the trappings of sex are approved of--in other words, fiction, films, leg shows.

It was D. H. Lawrence who pointed out the iniquity of sex films, where the sex-repressed youth, fearful of actual girls in sex in his own circle, showers all his sex emotion on a Hollywood star-and then goes home to masturbate. Lawrence, of course, did not mean that masturbation is wrong; he meant that it is unhealthy sex that seeks masturbation with the fantasy of a film star. Healthy sex would most surely seek a partner in the neighborhood.

Think of the enormous vested interests that thrive on repressed sex: the fashion people, the lipstick merchants, the church, the theaters and movies, the best-seller novelists, and the stocking manufacturers.

It would be foolish to say that a society sexually free would abolish beautiful clothes. Of course not. Every woman would want to look her best before the man she loved. Every man would like to appear elegant when he dated his girl. What would disappear would be fetishism--the valuing of the shadow because the reality is forbidden. Sex-repressed men would no longer stare at women’s lingerie in shop windows. What a horrible pity that sex interest is so repressed. The highest pleasure in the world is enjoyed with guilt. This repression enters into every aspect of human life, making life narrow, unhappy, hateful.

Hate sex and you hate life. Hate sex and you cannot love your neighbour. If you hate sex your sexual life you will be, at the worst, impotent or frigid; at best, incomplete. Hence the common remark by women who have had children, “Sex is an overrated pastime.” If sex is unsatisfactory, it must go somewhere, for it is too strong an urge to be annihilated. It goes into anxiety and hate.

Not many adults look upon the sex act as a giving; otherwise the percentage of people afflicted with impotency and frigidity would not be about seventy per cent, as quite a few experts have claimed it is. To many men, intercourse is polite rape; to many women, a tiresome rite that has to be endured.

Thousands of married women have never experienced an orgasm in their lives; and even some educated men do not know that a woman is capable of an orgasm. In such a system, giving must be minimal; and sex relations are bound to be more or less brutalized and obscene. The perverts who require to be scourged with whips or to beat women with rods are merely extreme cases of people who, owing to sex miseducation, are unable to give love except in the disguised form of hate.

Every older pupil at Summerhill knows from my conversation and my books that I approve of a full sex life for all who wish one, whatever their age. I have often been asked in my lectures if I provide contraceptives at Summerhill, and if not, why not? This is an old and a vexed question that touches deep emotions in all of us. That I do not provide contraceptives is a matter of bad conscience with me, for to compromise in any way is to me difficult and alarming. On the other hand, to provide contraceptives to children either over or under the age of consent would be a sure way of closing down my school. One cannot advance in practice too much ahead of the law.

A familiar question asked by critics of child freedom is, “Why don’t you let a small child see sexual intercourse?” The answer that it would give him a trauma, a severe nervous shock, is false. Among the Trobrianders, according to Malinowski, children see not only parental sexual intercourse but birth and death as matters of course, and are not affected adversely. I do not think that seeing sexual intercourse would have any bad emotional effect on a self-regulated child. The only honest answer to the question is to say that love in our culture is not a public matter.

I do not forget that many parents have religious or other negative views on the sinfulness of sex. Nothing can be done about them. They cannot be converted to our views. On the other hand, we must fight them when they infringe on our own children’s right to freedom, genital or otherwise.

To other parents, I say: Your big headache will come when your daughter of sixteen wants to live her own life. She will come in at midnight. On no account ask her where she has been. If she has not been self-regulated, she will lie to you just as you lied, and I lied, to our parents.

When my daughter is sixteen, should I find her in love with some insensitive man, I shall have more than one worry. I know that I shall be powerless to do anything. I hope I will have sense not to try. Since she has been self-regulated, I do not anticipate that she will fall for an undesirable type of young man; but one can never tell.

I am sure that many a bad companionship is fundamentally a protest against parental authority. My parents don’t trust me, and I don’t care. I’ll do what I like, and if they don’t like it, they can lump it.

Your fear will be that your daughter will be seduced. But girls are not as a rule seduced; they are partners in a seduction. This sixteen stage should not be difficult if your daughter has been your friend and not your subordinate. You will have to face the truth that no one can live another’s life that one cannot hand on experience in such essential things as emotional matters.

The basic question, after all, is the home attitude toward sex. If it has been healthy, you can safely give your daughter her own private room and a key to it. If it has been unhealthy, she will seek sex in the wrong way--possibly with the wrong men --and you are powerless. So with your son. You will not be so worried about him- because he cannot become pregnant. Yet with the wrong sex attitudes, he can easily mess up his life.

Few marriages are happy. Considering the infant training that the majority of people have had, it is a matter for astonishment that there should be any happy marriages at all. If sex is dirty in the nursery, it cannot be very clean in the wedding bed.

Where the sex relationship is a failure, everything else in the marriage is a failure. The unhappy couple, reared to hate sex hate each other. The children are a failure, for they miss the warmth of the home that is necessary to their own warm life. The sex repressions of their parents unconsciously give them the same repressions. The worst problem children come from such parents.

Sex Instruction

If the child’s questions are answered truthfully and without inhibition on the part of the parents, sex instruction becomes part of natural childhood. The pseudoscientific method is bad. I know a youth who was taught sex in this way, and he claims that he blushes when someone uses the word pollen. The factual truth about sex is, of course, important, but what’s more important is the emotional content. Doctors know all about the anatomy of sex, but they are not better lovers than the South Sea Islander - most likely they are not nearly as good.

The child is not so much interested in daddy’s statement that he puts his wee-wee into mother’s wee-wee as he is in why daddy does it. The child who has been allowed his own sex play will not need to ask why.

Sex instruction should not be necessary for a self-regulated child, for the term instruction implies previous neglect of the subject. If the child’s natural curiosity has been satisfied all the way by open and unemotional answers to all his questions, sex will not stand out as something that has to be specially taught. After all, we do not give a child lessons on his digestive apparatus or his excretory functions. The term sex instruction springs from the fact that sex activity is inhibited and made a mystery.

Inclusion of sex instruction in the public school curriculum provides dangerous opportunities for encouraging sex repression by moralizing. The mere term sex instruction suggests a formal, awkward lesson on anatomy and psychology by a timid teacher who fears that the subject may slip over the border into forbidden territory.

In most public schools, to tell the whole truth about love and birth would be to risk getting fired. Public opinion, as represented by the mothers, would not stand it. I have known more than one case of an irate mother who threatened dire consequences to a woman teacher who allegedly corrupted her child by her “filthy, godless, obscene teachings.”

On the other hand, the only difficulty about giving a free child all the knowledge about sex that he asks for is that of knowing how to make things clear. A child wants to know why every male horse is not a stallion or every male sheep is not a ram. The answer involves concepts beyond the range of a four-year-old, for castration is a process that cannot be explained in simple terms. Here each parent must do the best he can, remembering that nothing must be done in the way of lying or evasion.

A boy of five found a condom in his father’s pocket and naturally asked what it was. He accepted easily his father’s clear and simple explanation without any evident emotion.

In certain cases, however, I cannot see any objection in saying to the child that the subject is too difficult and should wait. After all, one often does this about other subjects. For example, when a child asks how an engine works, or who made God, a parent may say that the answer is too complex for him to understand at his age.

It is far better and safer to postpone an answer than to do what some foolish parents do - tell a child far too much. I recall a pupil, a Swiss girl of fifteen, saying, “Irmgart (aged ten) thinks that the doctor brings the babies. I knew where babies came from long ago. Mother told me. She told me more.”

I asked her what more she knew and she told me all about homosexuality and perversions. Here was a case of unwise truth-telling. The mother should have answered only the question that the child asked. Her ignorance of child nature made her tell the child much that the child could not possibly assimilate. The result was a neurotic daughter. Yet, in the main, I think that this unwise mother was wiser than the mother who deliberately lies to her child when he asks the secret of birth. For the child soon finds out that his mother lied. When the child does find out the truth--usually half told by companions in a dirty way--he thinks he knows why his mother told him a lie. How could Mother tell me anything as dirty as that!

And that is the attitude of society today toward birth. It is a dirty business, a shameful business. The fact that a pregnant mother tries to dress in a way to disguise her condition is enough to damn what we call our morality.

There are mothers who tell their children the truth about babies. Yet even among these there are many who tell the truth about birth but who lie about sex. They dodge telling their children that sexual intercourse is highly pleasurable.

My wife and I have never had to think twice about Zoe and her sex education. It has all seemed so simple, so obvious, and so charming--even if it has had its awkward moments, as when Zoe informed a spinster visitor that she, Zoe had come into the world because Daddy fertilized Mommy, adding with interest, “And who fertilizes you?”

By the way, we have found that a self-regulated child learns tact very early in life. Zoe could speak thus at three and a half; but at five our daughter began to realize that some things must not be said to some people. I have seen a similar sophistication in others who, unlike Zoe had not had self-regulation from the beginning.

Since Freud discovered the positive sexuality of small children, not enough has been done to study its manifestations. Books have been written about sexuality in babies; but as far as I know, no one has written a book about self-regulated children. Our daughter showed no marked interest in her own sex or that of her parents and playmates. She always saw us naked in the bathroom and in the lavatory. She disproved to my satisfaction the theory held by some psychologists that there is an instinctive, unconscious, innate modesty that makes a child embarrassed on seeing adult genitals or natural functions. That theory, like the similar one that there is an innate guilt about masturbation, is nonsense.

Parents of a self-regulated child will be likely to avoid all the dangerous and stupid mistakes about sex education, the mistakes that connect sex with wrongness and sin; but I am not so sure that there is not a danger from another quarter--the idealistic quarter. Long before there was any talk of self-regulation, some parents taught their children that sex was sacred and spiritual, something to be treated with awe and wonder and a kind of mystical, religious reverence. The modern parent may have no temptation to follow that kind of teaching, yet may succumb to something similar: the worship of the sexual function as a new-found god. It is difficult to define--perhaps it is too vague to define-all I can sense is a sort of holiness attached to sex, a subtle change in the voice when it is mentioned This attitude suggests a fear of pornography: God, if I don’t speak about sex with awe, they’ll think I am one of those who think sex something to make jokes about. I have been somewhat perturbed to see earnest young parents use words and tones not much different from those of the old brigade that talked reverently about the parts of the body that are holy. Sex has been so long a vulgar joke that the tendency is to jump to the opposite extreme and make it unmentionable--not because it is too evil, but because it is too good. That attitude must surely lead to a new sex fear and repression. If the child is to have a healthy attitude toward sex and a subsequent healthy love life, sex must remain on the earth. It has in itself everything, and all attempts to enhance it by raising it to a higher power are futile attempts to paint the lily.

Telling children that sex is sacred is simply a variant of the old story that sinners will go to hell. If you agree to call eating and drinking and laughing sacred, then I am with you when you call sex sacred. We can call everything sacred; but if we only select sex, then we are cheating ourselves and misguiding our children. It is the child who is sacred-sacred in the sense of being that which is not to be spoiled by ignorant teaching.

As the religious hatred of sex slowly dies, other enemies arise. We have the sex-instruction enthusiasts who show children diagrams and tell about the bees and the pollen, saying in effect, “Look, sex is just science. Nothing exciting about it, is there?” We have all been so conditioned about sex that it is almost impossible for us to see the middle, natural way; we are either too pro-sex or too anti-sex. To be pro-sex is good, but to be pro-sex as a protest against an anti-sex training in childhood is likely to be neurotic. Hence the necessity of finding a sane attitude toward sex, an attitude we can find only by non-interference with and approval of the natural child’s acceptance of sex.

If that sounds vague or impossible, I suggest that the young parent avoid any show of shame or disgust or moral feeling, refrain from teaching and from placating the neighbors when talking about sexual matters. Then, and only then, will the sex attitudes of a baby grow without inhibition or hatred of his flesh. For such a child sex will never have to be a subject of instruction or warning or anything else.

If we could prevent a child from seeing evil in sex, he would grow up a moral man--not a moralist, not a teacher of others. A Don Juan seemingly fulfills the pleasure component of sex while rejecting the love component. Masturbation, Don Juanism, homosexuality are all unproductive because they are asocial. The new moral man will find that he must fulfill both functions of sex: he will find that unless he loves, he will not find the greatest pleasure in the sexual act.

Masturbation

Mos

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 632